A Collection of Advice for Graduate Students
There’s a lot of advice floating around online for graduate students, but it can be hard to find, and hard for newbies to judge whether it’s any good.
To help out her students at Virginia Tech, philosopher Mercedes Corredor has created an organized selection of advice she finds worthwhile in one place, her “Resource Hub for Philosophy Students.”
In an email, she writes, “While there are other compiled lists out there (which I’ve linked to at the end of the Hub), I’ve aimed to make this one especially comprehensive.” She also notes that this particular list was designed for the Master’s Proseminar at Virginia Tech, and so is somewhat tailored to the interests of MA students.
Check it out, and if you have additions to suggest, you can mention them in the comments here or email them directly to Professor Corredor.
First: coffee.
Dan Korman has fantastic grad student advice: https://korman.faculty.philosophy.ucsb.edu/gradschool.pdf
I agree–it’s great. I tell incoming graduate students to study it.
He’s also a great human being.
*Buy a house.* You have a decent stipend and, if you’re a student in certain parts of the country (say, *not* CA or NY, but in the south or the Midwest), you can get a loan for a house. (There are specific loans for PhD students.) You have 5 years to live in it and build equity. (I think 3 years of a student contract remaining is all that you need for a loan.) You will very likely be better off for doing this in the end. I wish this advice had been pushed on me.
This is seriously irresponsible advice in an inflated housing market. It is also plain bad advice in any housing market in light of the simple fact of interest amortization which for most mortgages means you need well more than 5 years to start breaking even on interest. Ownership also involves huge time and emotion costs for repair and maintenance, interfering with your dissertation completion. Before making the biggest financial decision of your life always consult an advisor with experience (even if it’s a parent), not a random internet alias, mine included.
Agreed. Buying a house as a grad student is incredibly risky and unrealistic financially
Even with a permanent job and a secure financial situation it’s not clear that it’s the wisest investment.
Once I shared my site’s list of stuff with Liz Jackson (whose resource list is in Corredor’s list). At the time David Brink’s advice wasn’t on Jackson’s list, but I think she saw it linked on my site and linked it on hers. She thought Brink’s middle initial, ‘O,’ was part of his last name, and so he’s listed as David O’Brink on her list and also on Corredor’s list, presumably because Corredor got the link from Jackson. I feel a bit responsible for the whole thing so I would like to publicly state that his name is David Brink and O is his middle initial and anyone whose list of resources suggests otherwise might think about changing it.
The confluence of my Irish and Dutch heritages.
“Full funding” could mean very different things. It could mean that you would save money in graduate school and never worry about conference travels; and it could mean that you would have very limited travel funds, summer stipend, and monthly payments (with only a couple hundred dollars in your bank account for the entire summer…). Money is important for your quality of life and professional development.
The most important advice I didn’t get when I was a PhD student, and which would have saved me about 8 years of lallygagging around with postdocs and temp jobs, is to just look at the gold standard, job market wise: publishing in top 5 journals. So much time wasted in ‘low-return’ activity (such as putting crap in edited volumes, publishing in crappy and midrange journals). If you want a permanent job, it’s really top 5 or bust (and indeed, even more so now that the job market is really worse than ever). So, to those in grad school — focus on getting a (in fact multiple) top 5 papers and tune out the noise.
I echo this. There is far too much ideal theory in the background of advice PhD students are given; we can criticize the system all we want, but the facts are that if you don’t instill the above message into early career philosophers, they are not going to get a job. I will go a step further than “Top 5 or Bust” here and say that at least on the EU market for postdocs, increasingly, you need a top 5 (or at the very least multiple strong top 10s) to be taken seriously for externally funded postdocs, which I suspect will be even more competitive now that American PhD candidates will be more open to the European market given Trump’s crackdown on universities.
One complication here is that those in the position to be taken seriously for such advice, such as senior academics, will likely not believe the above is true, given that *they* didn’t need top 5s back in the day to get a permanent position. So, as I often hear, the wise old sage type will say that many people can get jobs with a wide range of CVs, what matters is whether your work is interesting. That, I stress, just isn’t true. I know of recent postdocs being advertised where there were over 100 applicants, and where 8 of the applicants had top 5s, and only 3 were shortlisted. Note that this is for a 3 year postdoc, not even a permanent job. The older crowd that says you don’t need top 5s means well no doubt, but they are using outdated information. Listen to the younger crowd that is on the job market.
It would be good to have some empirical evidence on this. Here’s a start at getting that kind of evidence.
(I’m assuming ‘top 5’ here means Phil Review, Mind, Nous, PPR, J Phil – the numbers would change with a different list.)
NYU currently has 2 assistant professors. Neither has a publication in a top 5 journal.
Pitt currently has 4 assistant professors. One of them has a publication in a top 5 journal.
Michigan currently has 3 assistant professors. One of them has a publication in a top 5 journal.
I’m not feeling convinced by the “top 5 or bust” thesis after a little looking, but maybe a wider study would make it look more plausible. (Of course, what that study needs is a CV at the time of hiring for everyone hired in the last few years, but I don’t know how we’d get that.)
Also, to fend off any misinterpretations, I think the assistant professors at these departments are great, and I think their papers are better than much of what is in the top 5 journals. I think paper quality trumps paper location for hiring purposes, and looking at the junior faculty at places like these seems to support that view.
Yes, to follow up on this – many people get good jobs with pubs in top speciality journals, rather than “top 5” generalist journals. So I’d also be careful with “Top Five or Bust” advice.
FYI: You don’t need multiple top 5 publications to get a TT job at an institution like mine (regional campus of a public university). 80% of our workload is teaching; 20% for service and research. You’d need to show you’ll do some research, so some mid-range journal articles are good, but evidence of good teaching is more important. So I would advise grad students to consider the various types of jobs they might apply for in the future in planning their time in grad school.
This is useful advice, at least in instilling into students a realistic idea about how competitive the market is. But if one wants to be more accurate, a paper as good as those journal papers can equally do the work, especially for departments where people feel confident to judge the quality themselves.
This is honestly absolutely terrible advice for most people. Marcus Arvan over at the Philosopher’s Cocoon has done the Lord’s work aggregating the data on this and it doesn’t seem at all true. Publishing helps but it’s more publishing full stop than it is publishing in the tippy top. In fact, he suggests that for certain people publishing too much in elite journals can hurt you in that you don’t look like a good fit for teaching focused jobs but lack the pedigree needed to compete for the R1 jobs.
And if you step back and think about it this makes perfect sense. Most jobs are not at R1s or R2s but rather teaching focused schools of one stripe or another. These schools care about you getting tenure– they don’t want to lose a line– but to do that at most of them just requires publishing and not publishing in tippy top journals. At some of them, like community colleges, publishing isn’t even necessary for getting tenure.
My advice would be figure out what jobs you might be competitive for and be brutally honest with yourself about them. If you go to a school outside the Leiter top ten you almost certainly aren’t getting a job in a research focused school and getting a paper in a top journal isn’t going to change that. (I’ve known of at least two cases where people with publications in top five journals but non-Leiterrific degrees didn’t get interviews for jobs at R1s that later went to people with PhD’s from top schools who not only hadn’t published at all but had failed to get tenure because they didn’t publish. Let that sink in for a minute.) Trying to be more competitive for research focused jobs if you have a degree from most programs is like buying a thousand Power Ball tickets. Sure your chances go up a bit but it’s still such a long shot that it’s a stupid way to spend your money or time and effort as the case may be.The academic caste system is what it is and don’t lie to yourself about it. But there are still a lot of jobs out there you could be competitive for. Make yourself as competitive as possible for them. In a lot of cases that looks like publishing a lot in good but not top journals. It might also look like getting more and more diverse teaching experience. At most community colleges community college teaching experience will cut a lot more ice than a publication in Phil Review or Ethics. (Online teaching experience used to also be a big one, but post pandemic everyone has that).
I’d add: not just teaching experience, but professional development in teaching and evidence that you have used it to develop your skills.
I agree with this except this bit “If you go to a school outside the Leiter top ten you almost certainly aren’t getting a job in a research focused school” – again, I’d encourage you to look at the data, by speciality. There are plenty of “non-top ten Leiter schools” that are elite in particular sub specialities and place people in research jobs (of course, keeping in mind that even Leiter top ten don’t usually go to top research jobs…)
False. We recruit for permanent jobs here (Cal Poly, SLO), and on the many search committees I’ve been on and chaired, I don’t recall a single instance of anyone noting that a candidate’s publication was in a top-whatever journal or not. And even if it were noted, it certainly didn’t decide anyone’s fate.
Though we’re primarily a teaching school, we still punch far above our weight class in research. 🥊
What an excellent resource! Thanks for sharing, Mercedes.
Two other resources that might be helpful:
Melissa Jacquart’s excellent set of classroom activities: https://melissajacquart.com/teaching/active-learning-activities/
Kino Zhao’s podcast interviewing philosophers in Alt-Ac careers, Off Campus: https://kinozhao.com/podcast/